Written by

kyle munson’s iowakmunson@dmreg.com

RED OAK, IA. — You know the situation is grim when community leaders usher 150 local high school students into an auditorium to pick their brains about how to stem southwest Iowa’s depopulation and beg them to stick around as the next generation of local entrepreneurs.

It was refreshing to witness this crop of bright young minds from 14 area schools join with a wide variety of adults to honestly confront their withering home turf. The adults included business owners, principals, college administrators, a state senator, an elite athlete, an architect and a computer programmer. Many of them were natives who initially fled to bigger cities only to boomerang back later in life.

Why return to southwest Iowa for some sort of bucolic ideal, a student asked during one breakout session?

“Did you just want to slow down or what?”

Katty Perez, a Red Oak senior who moved to Iowa from Los Angeles as a kindergartner, put it this way in a different session: “How would you guys draw us back to southwest Iowa?” She loves the rush of the city, she said, and looks forward to joining the throngs.

Larry Brandstetter, a city councilman in Red Oak and retired middle school teacher, eventually issued a plea: “If we don’t have you, southwest Iowa will shrivel up like a big ol’ prune.”

That’s an apt simile from the middle of Montgomery County, which lost 8.8 percent of its U.S. census population just this past decade. Red Oak itself shed 7.3 percent of its residents, yet its 5,742 headcount still outnumbers the entire population of 4,029 in neighboring Adams County to the east, Iowa’s least populated county.

It’s hard to get cell service for Facebook and Twitter out here, let alone entice newcomers. The big story of the year in southwest Iowa has been Missouri River flooding, but the steady stream of youth out of these rural areas remains a reliable statistical backdrop.

The conference was the brainchild of a concerned Shenandoah native, former Des Moines Register columnist Chuck “Iowa Boy” Offenburger. It began as one of his New Year’s resolutions in a column written for local radio station KMA. Even he has moved out of the region, but not far — just across Interstate Highway 80 to Greene County.

So Offenburger teamed up not only with KMA but also Arryn Blomstedt, a 2007 Red Oak graduate and senior at the University of Northern Iowa who’s currently student teaching at Golden Hills Elementary in the Papillion-La Vista district in the Omaha metro. She actually plans to settle in southwest Iowa to live and work.

Brandstetter and Jedd Sherman, Red Oak’s high school principal as well as a rare East Coast transplant, corralled the adult facilitators.

I have my own dog in this fight as a southwest Iowa native who graduated from the now-defunct Carson-Macedonia district (since consolidated into Riverside). Dave Gute, principal at Riverside in Oakland, was on hand Wednesday and said that his district has lost several hundred students in the last dozen years. Citizens will vote next year on a bond issue to build a new school. (Meanwhile, my former elementary school building in Macedonia was razed this fall. Offenburger said not to feel bad — all the Shenandoah schools he attended are long gone.)

Speaking of schools, Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds conducted a town hall meeting Tuesday night on the same Red Oak stage about their education reform plans. So the Wilson Performing Arts Center heard a lot of talk this week about reshaping rural Iowa’s future.

After Offenburger and Blomstedt’s introduction Wednesday in the auditorium, students dispersed and rotated through a trio of breakout sessions to tackle specific work, education and recreation issues.

In discussing employment, Brandstetter asked students not to think in terms of their individual tiny towns dotting the prairie. Don’t focus on the fact that they might be graduating with no more than a couple of dozen classmates.

Think of southwest Iowa as the 90,000 people within a 50-mile radius of Red Oak, he said. Think of the broader region tucked into the Omaha/Council Bluffs corner of the Omaha-Des Moines-Kansas City triangle.

Later, Kara Sherman, the Performing Arts Center’s executive director (and married to Jedd), said she attended the Iowa Tourism Conference last week in Okoboji and didn’t hear much about southwest Iowa. “We need our niche,” she said.

Aly Shea, a senior at Lewis Central High School, rarely leaves Council Bluffs to stray into rural southwest Iowa except for sports games or an academic event such as Wednesday’s conference. But she did fondly recall a week-long family vacation spent rambling through southwest and southern Iowa small towns — from the notorious Villisca Ax Murder House to the Bridges of Madison County and on to Adventureland in Altoona as the final destination.

“It was actually one of the most fun things we ever did,” said Shea.

One of the adult professionals, Bill Danforth, is a Shenandoah native who worked in Washington, D.C., before returning in 1980, eventually to operate his own computer programming firm for clients around the globe.

He didn’t return to southwest Iowa to slow down, he explained. He said he traded “spectator life” in the city for a more “participatory life” here — because fewer people means more chances to participate.

In concluding remarks, Offenburger also flipped the notion of depopulation on its head: There’s a “tremendous opportunity” on the horizon for however many of Wednesday’s 150 students who decide to return as well-educated entrepreneurs with earlier and easier access to leadership roles in their communities compared to cities.

John Pruss, general manager of United Farmers Mercantile Cooperative, based in Red Oak, offered a specific example: His ag business has grown from $30 million to $159 million annually in the past 13 years with an array of grain, fertilizer, convenience stores and farm maintenance. But he needs to keep growing, and one quarter of his work force is set to retire in the next five years.

The sum total of what I heard Wednesday more or less dovetailed with advice I received in recent weeks from Jon Bailey at the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Neb.

As a research and analysis program director, Bailey has been mining new U.S. census data for the latest population trends across 10 Great Plains states. And his center’s surveys of junior high and high school students have measured high interest in eventually returning home.

“They tell you they want to (return) after they’ve seen the world, experienced the world,” he said. So Bailey recommends a more deliberate rebranding of towns and farmsteads as places to boomerang back to later in life to raise families. Rural Iowa should just “let their children go and hope they come back.”

The 150 students left Red Oak Wednesday sensing much more than faint hope from the adults. There was no mistaking that southwest Iowa desperately wants them.

Kyle Munson can be reached at (515) 284-8124 or kmunson@ dmreg.com. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).